Using CPAN on Win32 ActivePerl

Most of you know ActivePerl, the commercial
Perl distribution provided to the community for free by ActiveState. In the beginning,
ActivePerl did not bundle a C compiler. As Windows does not include a compiler,
much of the CPAN was inaccessible to Windows users—any dependency on an
XS module would fail. ActiveState instead provided a repository of binary PPM
packages so that users could avoid the need to install and configure a C
compiler.

So began a rumor, and so the rumor became lore, that "ActivePerl Does Not Do
CPAN."

As wrong as that preconception had been (and a clever hacker could use MSVC
or MinGW with ActivePerl), that rumor became even more wrong on 26 August 2009,
when ActiveState delivered Perl 5.10.1 with a bundled C compiler. Even though
Windows does not support all POSIX features, using CPAN with
ActivePerl on Windows is almost as nice as using CPAN on a Unix-like system:

Download and install ActivePerl (5.12.4 and 5.14.1 are available at the time of this writing) with the default options

Open a command line window ( Start > Run > cmd )

Run cpan

That's it. That's only one extra step over running on Linux. For proof,
here's the output of my first run of the cpan command (edited for
brevity) and an installation of local::lib and cpanminus (yes, they
work too):